Bringing World Peace Through Software Engineering

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

Ok, in the last couple of weeks I've been working with Google Geocoding
but realised how easy it is to parse the return JSON in Python. In fact,
I was parsing the JSON result with Javascript - which does a very nice
job, but i needed or rather prefered to have better control than what
Javascript provides.

And this is where Python comes in. If you
have been working with Python for a while, you will have noticed that
JSON is nothing more than a Python Dictionary. This makes accessing the
key/value quite effortless.
To give you a simple example, here's an output of a simple address query using Google's Geocoding API:
http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=8-10%20Broadway,%20London%20SW1H%200BG,%20United%20Kingdom&sensor=false

What is displayed above is the result of the URL we supplied to Google's
Geocoding API. Of course, we couldn't display that to our users - that
would be daft. Most of the time you'd want to parse this info and use
the values in your application.
In our case we had to extract the Lat and Long for our application.
There was no need to display the JSON - Python makes this a breeze and
all we need is to use Python's urllib2 module to open up the URL and
read the result.
So, to parse that and display the full address in human-readable format, it's as simple as doing something list this:
>>> import json
>>> import urllib2
>>> j = urllib2.urlopen('http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=8-10%20Broadway,%20London%20SW1H%200BG,%20United%20Kingdom&sensor=false')
>>> js = json.load(j)
Please note that we used load() instead of loads(). You would typically
use loads() for strings, but load() is designed for resources such as
files and - and in our example - a URL.
Now to display the address, we simply loop through our dictionary like so:
>>> ourResult = js['results'][0]['address_components']
>>> for rs in ourResult:
... print rs['long_name']
...
8-10
Broadway
Westminster
London
Greater London
United Kingdom
SW1H 0BG
London
>>>
With that out of the way, what about our main focus which is to print the coordinate of a particular address? Well, it turns out that that is even a lot simpler.
This time we just navigate our way down until we find what we're after. Which in this case is the latitude and longitude.
>>> ourResult = js['results'][0]['geometry']['location']
>>> print ourResult['lat'], ourResult['lng']
51.4987343 -0.1331221
>>>
One other cool thing about parsing JSON with Python is that you can
quickly and easily map the results into your Django Model and do
anything dangoey with it. Here's an example:
objs = json.loads(request.POST)
# Iterate through the stuff in the list
for o in objs:
# Do something Djangoey with o's name and message, like
record = myDjangoModel(name = o.name, message = o.message)
record.save()
Now, if you are looking to mix Python, JSON and Django together - it is as simple what we've just shown above.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

This is a long overdue book. Python has been steadily growing in popularity in multiple industry verticals over the past decade and the different sub-cultures have brought a variety of programming styles and methodologies to the language. As more and more Python code is powering today's production and mission-critical systems it becomes essential to ensure quality and reliability while maintaining efficient and agile development practices.

There has been a flurry of literature written in recent years about the overall benefits of agile methodologies and test-driven development. To a large extent, however, individual developers and teams have been left on their own to figure out how to put this philosophy to practice and extract maximum benefit from it in their trade.

David Sale's book alleviates this issue for Python developers by providing extremely pragmatic, timely and well-organized guidelines as well as many specific examples on how to approach the development and testing of complex systems in a way that amounts to building better software.This is not an academic work - it focuses exclusively on practical solutions to real-world industry problems.

Fairly short and to the point, the book mixes equal portions of justification and tutorial-style examples to work through.

The author has picked some of the best Python tools that are currently available for the various tasks at hand, but the reader will be well equipped to make their own choices once they understand the basic concepts.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Wow, it's been a long while since I last posted something here. As always work and family have been taking a huge chunk of my free time - making it almost impossible to drop by to update this blog.

That said, I have been playing around with Peewee. It is a very small ORM (Object Relational Mapping) framework for working with your database. It is fits very well with things like Flask or Bottle Python frameworks. If you've spent time developing in Django you will feel very much at home. All the models and queries are basically the same except a few that make the Peewee stand out.

It currently supports PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite. Installation is a breeze - just use pip at a command prompt like so:

$pip install peewee

Here is a sample application that defines our models, creates the tables, inserts the data and prints them all out again.

For those who like to take control of their SQL, Peewee also allows you to run raw SQL commands. Here is an example of it:

db=SqliteDatabase(':memory:')classPerson(Model):name=CharField()classMeta:database=db# let's pretend we want to do an "upsert", something that SQLite can# do, but peewee cannot.fornamein('charlie','mickey','huey'):db.execute_sql('REPLACE INTO person (name) VALUES (?)',(name,))# now let's iterate over the people using our own query.forpersoninPerson.raw('select * from person'):printperson.name# .raw() will return model instances.

I find it quite interesting mixing it with Flask. There are a few ideas I have and will explore them over the weekend and post the result here.
There are tons of things you can do with this little framework - so go explore and see what you come up with.
Good luck!